


non-definitive acts

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Sparring, Team Arrow, Team Dynamics, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:03:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1368205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>One evening Oliver put his hand on her shoulder when he said good night, and the next night he didn’t.</i> </p><p>The team has undergone a few changes lately, not the least of which is Oliver's relationship with Felicity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	non-definitive acts

**Author's Note:**

> Compliant with 2x14, "Time of Death."

Oliver didn’t notice how often he touched Felicity until he stopped doing it. Nothing bad had happened, at least not by Oliver’s admittedly melodramatic standards—just one evening he put his hand on her shoulder when he said good night, and the next night he didn’t. Part of it was likely due to Sara—it was easier, Oliver discovered, to reach out to Sara, because Sara had turned into the sort of person who used body language as an explicit form of permission. Her posture never needed to give any additional information, but she gave it anyway—generous and stubborn to a fault. The way Sara slunk into his personal space did a lot for how touch-starved Oliver felt most of the time, starved specifically for a touch that didn’t leave a mark in its wake.

As usual, Diggle was the one to bring it up—he usually did, when a problem circled itself around Felicity. Oliver was starting to realize that those five months he’d left the two of them alone had had a very specific toll on how much loyalty either of them would grant Oliver at any specific moment.

“What’s going on between you and Felicity?” Diggle punctuated the question with a blow to Oliver’s gut—a not unusual occurrence, though the force behind it was harder than it might normally have been.

“There’s nothing going on,” Oliver grunted back, and dropped down, hoping to kick Digg’s knee in retaliation. He wasn’t quite out of breath, but he still missed. Diggle reached down and grabbed Oliver by the scruff of the neck, forcing him down flat on the mat, and dug a knee in Oliver’s back for good measure.

“Explain why your little romance is making you act like you’re on some damn island, then,” Diggle said. He let Oliver back up. Diggle generally looked unbothered by these sorts of conversations, even though he was reliably Felicity’s best advocate. His default expression reminded Oliver of a particularly obstreperous cat Thea had owned in the second grade—superior and aware of it. “You barely say anything to her aside from demanding a status update. It’s a big change from how cozy you’ve been.”

Oliver thought about it, which he hated doing—not that he didn’t ever think, exactly. Oliver thought about most things a great deal; Diggle called it “brooding,” and he wasn’t wrong. Oliver just didn’t like to think about Felicity, and about what she signified, because that was a loaded gun he was not yet ready to fire. Not thinking about her was like keeping his index finger set alongside the trigger instead of upon it, like stringing the bow but never nocking the arrow.

“I didn’t notice,” he finally said, which was true. Oliver had made a particular habit out of not noticing the traps he set for himself.

“Well, everyone else has,” Diggle said. That was the end of it, because Sara sauntered in with her staff in hand, and the resulting sparring took up what remained of the afternoon. Oliver pretended to let the subject drop away, but now that Diggle had brought it up, the notion was like accidently biting the inside of his cheek: a sore spot. Oliver kept worrying about it.

It bothered him enough that he held back when Diggle and Sara left the Foundry—Diggle to go home and Sara to pace around the Glades for a few hours, until she was tired enough to actually sleep. She did that a lot, and he knew better than to follow her. Oliver kissed her before she left, and she butted her head against the center of his chest before she turned to leave. The motion, like many of Sara’s motions, felt calculated but might not have been, and the realization made Oliver ache. He’d known her back when her body language had been uncoordinated and unburdened; it was hard to reconcile.

“More practice?” Felicity asked when she realized he’d stayed behind. “You know, there are numerous studies proving that rest is an essential part of any fitness regime, I bet I could come up with some quality citations for you to—totally ignore, never mind, you don’t even read my work emails asking where you want your lunch order from. More tennis balls tonight?”

“Not tonight,” Oliver said. He unfolded the all-purpose wool blanket they kept lying around—Oliver had woken beneath it on more than one occasion—and laid it out on the medical table, setting the bow down so he could unstring it. “Maintenance.”

“Me too,” Felicity said, gesturing to her computers—Oliver even thought of them as her computers now. Sometimes he forgot that he knew how to turn them on, let alone run basic operations. She looked unfamiliar; Oliver realized she’d washed her face, and it was bare of her usual lipstick and eyeliner. It was incongruous, considering she was still wearing one of her improbable dresses from the office, this one dark grey without any sheen to it. It looked like something his mother might have worn when she was younger; on Felicity, it just made her sit up straight and keep both feet on the floor, something that she didn’t always do towards the end of the night.

He cleaned the bow, and oiled it, and checked the strings for good measure, all the while listening to Felicity’s careful, continuous tapping. She’d put ear buds in a few minutes after he’d started working on the bow, presumably because Oliver hadn’t figured out what to say to her, and occasionally he heard her half-humming along to the music.

Whatever maintenance she had, it didn’t take her long. She rebooted the computers and got up to leave before he’d finished reassembling the mechanisms of the bow—Oliver remembered, not for the first time, that she’d had it made for him, a fact about which he felt grateful and a little ashamed. She was braver than he was; even with the distance he hadn’t noticed, she still approached him while she fastened the buttons of her coat.

“Don’t burn the midnight oil too long,” she said, “you’ve got another one of those interminable finance meetings in the morning, I don’t know who your assistant is, but if I were you? I’d try and stay on her good side. Maybe even show up on time.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, smiling for the first time in hours; the motion felt stiff on his skin, like he’d been frowning for too long and needed a second to remember how to relax his face into another expression. “Any tips for getting on her good side?”

“Flowers, chocolates, promises you don’t intend to keep,” Felicity recited. “Coffee. Paid vacation days. I mean, she’s not easy, but everybody’s got a price, you know?” She reached out and put the palm of her hand against the back of his elbow, giving him a companionable little squeeze. “Get some rest, Oliver,” she told him.

And there it was; the look she got when she had faith in him, and had faith in what they were doing. Oliver dragged a rag over his fingers, too quickly, so he could reach out to her, too.

“Felicity,” he said. Her name sat in his mouth even after he’d said it; there was a weight to it, like there was a weight to the sensation of her hand against his arm, and it made Oliver want to hold on to her. He felt like a coward. In a lot of ways, Oliver never stopped feeling like a coward. It was something that had dogged him before the island and it remained with him in its wake. “Thank you. For putting up with this.”

He couldn’t have put what he meant into more precise language, but—Felicity had a way of seeing through him, and understanding what he meant, most of the time.

“You’re my friend, Oliver,” she said, smiling at him. She had dark circles under her eyes and a healing acne mark along her chin, but she still looked, in her own way, luminous. “I believe in you.”

Oliver let his hand slide from her elbow. Her honesty was uncomfortable to bear, but it was still a gift. Oliver had learned to be grateful for it. “Want me to walk you to your car?” he asked. “It’s late.”

“I’m good,” she said. “And I know. Don’t forget about that meeting, if only so your investors will stop calling me for updates.”

She turned and walked away, up the stairs—Oliver really needed to reinforce that railing, one of these days—and left. Oliver didn’t watch her go, because he still had the guts of his bow laid out in front of him and he was actually tired enough that he was beginning to lose track of the pieces. It took a monumental effort to finish reassembling it, by which time—fortunately or unfortunately—he could hear the vague noises upstairs that meant the club was closing down. Clubs closed at four, even midweek, a time he’d loved when he was younger and was mildly horrified by now.

Sara wasn’t waiting up for him when Oliver finally came to bed, but she roused a little when he sat down on the edge so he could take off his shoes.

“Did you talk to her?” she asked. Her voice was a slow, slurring mumble that didn’t quite carry; Oliver knew what she was saying mostly because it was a question Sara always thought to ask. It was relevant regardless of whom she was referring to; Oliver avoided talking to the women in his life, as a rule.

“Yeah,” he said, dropping down beside her, careful not to jostle her. For all her ease around him, Sara didn’t like to be touched at night. Once he’d reached out to her and she’d answered with the wrong name, an experience neither of them were anxious to repeat.

“Ollie,” Sara said, dragging the nickname out so it was practically onomatopoeia: _Olll-ieee,_ the low, whining sound of Sara falling asleep and Oliver being an idiot.

“I know,” Oliver told her. Sara rolled back onto her side. Oliver realized, between one blink and the next, that he’d forgotten to set an alarm and would probably be late to that meeting after all. He made fists out of his empty hands as he fell asleep, and dreamed about something far outside of his reach. It could have been anything.


End file.
